ANSI escape character sequences are commonly used to produce colored terminal text on Macs and Unix. Colorama provides some shortcuts to generate these sequences, and makes them work on Windows too.

This has the happy side-effect that existing applications or libraries which already use ANSI sequences to produce colored output on Linux or Macs (eg. using packages like 'termcolor') can now also work on Windows, simply by importing and initialising Colorama.

Status

In development. Some features, as noted below, are not implemented yet.

If you are on Windows, the call to ''init()'' will start filtering ANSI escape sequences out of any text sent to stdout or stderr, and will replace them with equivalent Win32 calls.

Calling ''init()'' has no effect on other platforms (unless you use 'autoreset', see below) The intention is that all applications should call init() unconditionally, then their colored text output simply works on all platforms.

Colorama works by wrapping stdout and stderr with proxy objects, that override write() to do their work. Using init(autoreset=True) will do this wrapping on all platforms, not just Windows.

If these proxy objects wrapping stdout and stderr cause you problems, then this can be disabled using init(wrap=False) (Not implemented), and you can instead access Colorama's AnsiToWin32 proxy directly. Any attribute access on this object will be forwarded to the stream it wraps, apart from .write(), which on Windows is overridden to first perform the ANSI to Win32 conversion on text: